Labour must pull itself away from union influence

FINALLY we know the lengths to which the union Unite went to try to ensure that its favoured candidate won the Labour party's nomination as its candidate in Falkirk at the next election.Unfortunately for Ed Miliband the information comes not from the inquiry into allegation of vote-rigging in Falkirk, which the Labour leader initiated then abruptly terminated last month, but from Ineos, the company at the heart of the Grangemouth oil refinery dispute.

Stevie Deans, who is chairman of the Labour constituency party in Falkirk, is also Unite's leader at the refinery. Ineos alleges that he was using the company's email system to conduct Labour party business.

Emails have now been passed by the company to the police.

Why couldn't Miliband's own investigation have got to the bottom of the Falkirk affair? Perhaps he didn't want to.

The Labour leader is very good at making speeches about modernising his party and distancing itself from the unions but when it comes to it he is too scared to take on Labour's biggest donor.

It isn't just the Falkirk constituency party over which Unite holds sway, it is the entire Labour party. That matters because as Unite has demonstrated twice this year - in its behaviour over the Falkirk nomination and its role in the Grangemouth dispute - the trade union movement has changed little in the 35 years since the Winter of Discontent.

The Grangemouth oil refinery [REX]

Last week's Grangemouth dispute was a reminder of just how far the unions lag behind popular opinion

THEIR new corporatestyle names and logos cannot disguise their dinosaur tendencies. Just as in 1978/79 they exist not primarily to promote the interests of their members but to give their leaders the chance to exercise raw power.

British attitudes have changed hugely since the Seventies. We have a much more entrepreneurial culture.

It is much more accepted that you cannot expect pay rises as a right, you have to earn them through increased productivity.

It is accepted, too, that sometimes industries do decline and die not necessarily because their workers are doing anything wrong but because technology can render them obsolete. Even the Left now accepts, for example, that the age of coal is over.

Last week's Grangemouth dispute was a reminder of just how far the unions lag behind popular opinion. It was a throwback to the days when unions thought that British workers could carry on paying themselves more and more, regardless of competition from more efficient businesses abroad.

As for the efforts to control Labour's choice of candidate at Falkirk, they belong back in the bad old days when union leaders used to turn up at Labour party conferences wielding their block vote, and when they used to have beer and sandwiches with Jim Callaghan at Number 10, thinking they ran the country.

Since those days Tony Blair was supposed to have modernised Labour's relationship with the unions. He succeeded in persuading his members to drop their commitment to universal nationalisation of the means of production but in one other vital respect Blair failed miserably to modernise his party: it remains pathetically dependent on union funding.

While union membership has declined over the past generation it has not done so at anything like the rate that the Labour party's membership has declined: it is 7.2 million members against 190,000.

Ed Miliband is under pressure as he owes his party leadership to Unite and other unions [REX]

For Ed Miliband though it is about more than just money. He knows that he owes his position as party leader to Unite and the other big unions. Had Labour had a straightforward voting system of one member one vote his brother David would now be leader.

It is only because the party reserves a third of its votes for trade union members that Ed became leader, the unions having strongly advised their members to vote for him.

That is the tragedy of Ed Miliband. Although he knows that Labour needs to wrench itself away from the unions he lacks the mandate to bring about the necessary change. He will always be known as the unions' candidate.

ED MILIBAND'S tone for his leadership was set during his first conference speech. As he told the audience that he would have no truck with irresponsible strikes one bearded figure was filmed mouthing a word which looked very much like, "Rubbish!" That was leader of Unite Len McCluskey who couldn't suppress his ambition to control the Labour leader even for five minutes when the world was watching.

This autumn Miliband has staged a bit of a revival to what had seemed to be his flagging political fortunes. He has done so by addressing the concerns of people who are working hard but struggling to pay their energy bills.

His time in the sun will prove extremely short however unless he gets on top of his problem with the unions. The cost of freeing his party from union control will be immense. Unite alone gave Labour £772,195 in the second quarter of this year. That is an awful lot of mailshots and campaign calls.

But the cost of failing to address the unions will be immensely greater for Labour. The association between the party and the unions that caused the Winter of Discontent kept Labour out of office for 18 years.

If Miliband fails to convince us that he has freed himself from the control of Unite and the other unions he will cast the Labour party into the wilderness for just as long.